I also considered calling this post “The Victim”, but that seems a little too morbid.
My dad, Mike, was born September 30th, 1952, in Rosemont, PA, or thereabouts. He was the 8th of 11 children. Older than he were 5 boys and 2 girls, and younger than he were 2 boys and 1 girl. He was, quite obviously, born into your typical mid-20th Century Irish Catholic family. He grew up across the street from another family which had even more kids than his own, and these two families notoriously roamed the streets of Rosemont and Garrett Hill getting into trouble. My mother, who knew my Uncle Eddie before she knew my father, once made a deal with Eddie: for every day Eddie attended school, my mother would pay him a dime. For every day Eddie skipped, he’d pay my mother the same. Apparently, Eddie still owes my mother some money.
My grandmother, whom I’ve never met, or can’t recall meeting if I have, was, it would seem, the type of harried mother of eleven that was somewhat typical in the 1950s and 1960s. She would tell her children not to climb on the roof, or up a tree, and when the children inevitably did so, anyway, and fell, breaking a leg, sympathy was not forthcoming. She would, instead, yell and scream about the thickheadedness of her children, and grudgingly drive the injured to the hospital, while the rest scattered to the wind like leaves. She was, by all accounts, a good mother.
My grandfather, James Harvey Shillingford, affectionately called “J Harv” by his children (never to his face, of course), has always been, in my mind, another sort of 1950/60s stereotype. Gruff, stern, distant, a working man, and with a bit of a drinking problem. I have never met him, either. My favorite story involving him is when J Harv, one afternoon, backed over the family dog, while exiting the driveway. As his children screamed, J Harv, confused, stopped the car, changed gears, and pulled back into his spot, running the dog over a second time, and permanently ending any chance of survival for the poor thing.
A number of my aunts and uncles expected my father to become a Catholic priest. Apparently, Dad was quite the dedicated alterboy. Until, of course, Dad got in a little trouble with the law–as a 12 year old–and was forbidden to participate in the church service in which the visiting Bishop would be present. Dad quit his duties as an alter boy, and thereafter stopped going to church. He’s never really picked it up again, going only when my mother forces him to. Instead of his supposed destiny as a man of the cloth, Dad made it through high school, did this and that while my mother went to Hollins College in Virginia, and eventually became an electrician, at first working for a company, before setting off on his own.
Growing up, I had mixed feelings about my dad. He smoked cigarettes, and drank too much, and could become frightening in his drinking. Violent, sometimes, or, at least, more prone to violence. If my brothers or I did something wrong, we would normally get a spanking. If Dad had been drinking, that spanking was all the more severe. It is what it is. We all survived, and are more or less healthy and happy, or whatever.
Dad isn’t an emotional guy. Mom reports that he cries, from time to time, while watching sad movies or something like that. I’ve seen him cry once. A month before my 19th birthday. We’ll deal with that in another post. Primarily, my dad has a sort of neutral emotion. He can be found, most times of the day, sitting at the head of the dining room table, his skinny legs crossed at the knees, reading the newspaper. During the week, it was the Philadelphia Daily News (Philly’s magazine style paper, like the NY Post), and on the weekends, he switched to the Philadelphia Inquirer (the paper of record). He moved to the living room to watch TV for sports games. Eagles or Phillies or Flyers or Sixers or Penn State football or Villanova basketball (with lesser affections for the other Big 5 schools). Sports, like just about anything else, evoked one of two emotions from my father: annoyance, and joy. Annoyance, of course, had many shades. Sometimes, it would build into rage: kids’ report cards weren’t so great, there are bills to pay, his customers are late in paying him, and now the Eagles lose, and so, he’d blow his top. His anger was, generally, a slow build to a big explosion.
Another shade of annoyance was when it was impossible to tell if Dad was in a good mood or a bad one. My younger brother, Stephen, once walked into the living room where my Dad and I were watching TV, and said “hi”. He might have said it in a silly voice, I can’t remember. Not that it matters, because seconds later, Stephen was sent to his room to the night “for being weird”.
Dad was a tough guy to understand, when we were children.
